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I'm Tired of Talking to AI
I’m tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me AI’s answer.
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 660 posts.
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Things to know when you get cancer
Personal website and portfolio
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Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
Broken updates, Copilot shoved everywhere, and my system bricking itself. Here's why I finally escaped to Linux.
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Don't be a meat proxy
Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:
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If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort
An ever-increasing volume of debug investigations, document writing, and code is written by robots. This has created a new etiquette question when working with a team - when is it OK to forward the output of an AI to another human to read?
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In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years
In remembrance of his beloved and brilliant wife, Elise Cawley, and their 36 years together, Stephen Wolfram shares memories of their family and home and relates Elise's many accomplishments and contributions to mathematics.
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Writing by hand is good for your brain
Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your brain, which is a good thing.
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Everything I own, owned
Turning Claude loose on the firmware of five USB and WiFi peripherals, and finding a command shell in a microphone, a defeatable webcam activity LED, and unauthenticated memory writes over the network.
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Can we have the day off?
So, apparently we are at the cusp of the entire world’s white collar workforce (and, by extension, much of the US workforce) undergoing a revolution in productivity. AI is the technology that is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we interact with the world, the way we learn, the way we socialize, and all…
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Filing the corners off my MacBooks
I file the sharp corners off my MacBooks. People like to freak out about this, so I wanted to post it here to make sure that everyone who wants to freak out about it gets the opportunity to do so.
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Om Malik has died
Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends. We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in th…
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I miss thinking hard
AI has changed the experience of being an engineer, starving my Thinker side while satisfying the Builder ...
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“I just chose words carefully”
A blog about software craft and quality
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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
Gmail's rapid descent into belittling their users, powered by AI.
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I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
When you talk about Papua New Guinea, people may say, oh, is that the place where:
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I'm helping my dog vibe code games
My cavapoo Momo vibe coded playable Godot games. All I had to do was teach her to type, route her input to Claude Code, and build the right tools.
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Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid
Modern cars are computers on wheels that send home nonstop telemetry about you. In this post I remove my 2024 RAV4 Hybrid's modem and GPS to prevent that :)
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Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
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I don't want to read what you didn't write
Intentional writing will likely become more valuable.
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15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
How Microsoft continvoucly morged my Git branching diagram.
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I moved my digital stack to Europe
On digital sovereignty, and why European cloud is better than you think
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I'm going back to writing code by hand
I vibe-coded a GPU-aware Kubernetes TUI for 7 months, archived it, and started over. Here's what AI gets wrong when projects grow complex.
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“This is not the computer for you”
There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.
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I'm OK being left behind, thanks
Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre…
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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing
On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.
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Do dentists know what they're doing?
After all, they’re just practicing
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My AI Adoption Journey
My experience adopting any meaningful tool is that I've necessarily gone through three phases: (1) a period of inefficiency (2) a period of adequacy, then finally (3) a period of workflow and life-altering discovery.